The Magic Skin

“‘She is like every woman who is beyond our reach,’ Rastignac interrupted.

“‘I am mad,’ I cried; ‘I can feel the madness raging at times in my brain. My ideas are like shadows; they flit before me, and I cannot grasp them. Death would be preferable to this life, and I have carefully considered the best way of putting an end to the struggle. I am not thinking of the living Foedora in the Faubourg Saint Honore, but of my Foedora here,’ and I tapped my forehead. ‘What to you say to opium?’

“‘Pshaw! horrid agonies,’ said Rastignac.

“‘Or charcoal fumes?’

“‘A low dodge.’

“‘Or the Seine?’

“‘The drag-nets, and the Morgue too, are filthy.’

“‘A pistol-shot?’

“‘And if you miscalculate, you disfigure yourself for life. Listen to me,’ he went on, ‘like all young men, I have pondered over suicide. Which of us hasn’t killed himself two or three times before he is thirty? I find there is no better course than to use existence as a means of pleasure. Go in for thorough dissipation, and your passion or you will perish in it. Intemperance, my dear fellow, commands all forms of death. Does she not wield the thunderbolt of apoplexy? Apoplexy is a pistol-shot that does not miscalculate. Orgies are lavish in all physical pleasures; is not that the small change for opium? And the riot that makes us drink to excess bears a challenge to mortal combat with wine. That butt of Malmsey of the Duke of Clarence’s must have had a pleasanter flavor than Seine mud. When we sink gloriously under the table, is not that a periodical death by drowning on a small scale? If we are picked up by the police and stretched out on those chilly benches of theirs at the police-station, do we not enjoy all the pleasures of the Morgue? For though we are not blue and green, muddy and swollen corpses, on the other hand we have the consciousness of the climax.

“‘Ah,’ he went on, ‘this protracted suicide has nothing in common with the bankrupt grocer’s demise. Tradespeople have brought the river into disrepute; they fling themselves in to soften their creditors’ hearts. In your place I should endeavor to die gracefully; and if you wish to invent a novel way of doing it, by struggling with life after this manner, I will be your second. I am disappointed and sick of everything. The Alsacienne, whom it was proposed that I should marry, had six toes on her left foot; I cannot possibly live with a woman who has six toes! It would get about to a certainty, and then I should be ridiculous. Her income was only eighteen thousand francs; her fortune diminished in quantity as her toes increased. The devil take it; if we begin an outrageous sort of life, we may come on some bit of luck, perhaps!’

“Rastignac’s eloquence carried me away. The attractions of the plan shone too temptingly, hopes were kindled, the poetical aspects of the matter appealed to a poet.

“‘How about money?’ I said.

“‘Haven’t you four hundred and fifty francs?’

“‘Yes, but debts to my landlady and the tailor – ’

“‘You would pay your tailor? You will never be anything whatever, not so much as a minister.’

“‘But what can one do with twenty louis?’

“‘Go to the gaming-table.’

“I shuddered.

“‘You are going to launch out into what I call systematic dissipation,’ said he, noticing my scruples, ‘and yet you are afraid of a green table-cloth.’

“‘Listen to me,’ I answered. ‘I promised my father never to set foot in a gaming-house. Not only is that a sacred promise, but I still feel an unconquerable disgust whenever I pass a gambling-hell; take the money and go without me. While our fortune is at stake, I will set my own affairs straight, and then I will go to your lodgings and wait for you.’

“That was the way I went to perdition. A young man has only to come across a woman who will not love him, or a woman who loves him too well, and his whole life becomes a chaos. Prosperity swallows up our energy just as adversity obscures our virtues. Back once more in my Hotel de Saint-Quentin, I gazed about me a long while in the garret where I had led my scholar’s temperate life, a life which would perhaps have been a long and honorable one, and that I ought not to have quitted for the fevered existence which had urged me to the brink of a precipice. Pauline surprised me in this dejected attitude.

“‘Why, what is the matter with you?’ she asked.

“I rose and quietly counted out the money owing to her mother, and added to it sufficient to pay for six months’ rent in advance. She watched me in some alarm.

“‘I am going to leave you, dear Pauline.’

“‘I knew it!’ she exclaimed.

“‘Listen, my child. I have not given up the idea of coming back. Keep my room for me for six months. If I do not return by the fifteenth of November, you will come into possession of my things. This sealed packet of manuscript is the fair copy of my great work on “The Will,”’ I went on, pointing to a package. ‘Will you deposit it in the King’s Library? And you may do as you wish with everything that is left here.’

“Her look weighed heavily on my heart; Pauline was an embodiment of conscience there before me.

“‘I shall have no more lessons,’ she said, pointing to the piano.

“I did not answer that.

“‘Will you write to me?’

“‘Good-bye, Pauline.’

“I gently drew her towards me, and set a kiss on that innocent fair brow of hers, like snow that has not yet touched the earth – a father’s or a brother’s kiss. She fled. I would not see Madame Gaudin, hung my key in its wonted place, and departed. I was almost at the end of the Rue de Cluny when I heard a woman’s light footstep behind me.

“‘I have embroidered this purse for you,’ Pauline said; ‘will you refuse even that?’

“By the light of the street lamp I thought I saw tears in Pauline’s eyes, and I groaned. Moved perhaps by a common impulse, we parted in haste like people who fear the contagion of the plague.

“As I waited with dignified calmness for Rastignac’s return, his room seemed a grotesque interpretation of the sort of life I was about to enter upon. The clock on the chimney-piece was surmounted by a Venus resting on her tortoise; a half-smoked cigar lay in her arms. Costly furniture of various kinds – love tokens, very likely – was scattered about. Old shoes lay on a luxurious sofa. The comfortable armchair into which I had thrown myself bore as many scars as a veteran; the arms were gnashed, the back was overlaid with a thick, stale deposit of pomade and hair-oil from the heads of all his visitors. Splendor and squalor were oddly mingled, on the walls, the bed, and everywhere. You might have thought of a Neapolitan palace and the groups of lazzaroni about it. It was the room of a gambler or a mauvais sujet, where the luxury exists for one individual, who leads the life of the senses and does not trouble himself over inconsistencies.

“There was a certain imaginative element about the picture it presented. Life was suddenly revealed there in its rags and spangles as the incomplete thing it really is, of course, but so vividly and picturesquely; it was like a den where a brigand has heaped up all the plunder in which he delights. Some pages were missing from a copy of Byron’s poems: they had gone to light a fire of a few sticks for this young person, who played for stakes of a thousand francs, and had not a faggot; he kept a tilbury, and had not a whole shirt to his back. Any day a countess or an actress or a run of luck at ecarte might set him up with an outfit worthy of a king. A candle had been stuck into the green bronze sheath of a vestaholder; a woman’s portrait lay yonder, torn out of its carved gold setting. How was it possible that a young man, whose nature craved excitement, could renounce a life so attractive by reason of its contradictions; a life that afforded all the delights of war in the midst of peace? I was growing drowsy when Rastignac kicked the door open and shouted:

“‘Victory! Now we can take our time about dying.’

“He held out his hat filled with gold to me, and put it down on the table; then we pranced round it like a pair of cannibals about to eat a victim; we stamped, and danced, and yelled, and sang; we gave each other blows fit to kill an elephant, at sight of all the pleasures of the world contained in that hat.

“‘Twenty-seven thousand francs,’ said Rastignac, adding a few bank-notes to the pile of gold. ‘That would be enough for other folk to live upon; will it be sufficient for us to die on? Yes! we will breathe our last in a bath of gold – hurrah!’ and we capered afresh.

“We divided the windfall. We began with double-napoleons, and came down to the smaller coins, one by one. ‘This for you, this for me,’ we kept saying, distilling our joy drop by drop.

“‘We won’t go to sleep,’ cried Rastignac. ‘Joseph! some punch!’

“He threw gold to his faithful attendant.

“‘There is your share,’ he said; ‘go and bury yourself if you can.’

“Next day I went to Lesage and chose my furniture, took the rooms that you know in the Rue Taitbout, and left the decoration to one of the best upholsterers. I bought horses. I plunged into a vortex of pleasures, at once hollow and real. I went in for play, gaining and losing enormous sums, but only at friends’ houses and in ballrooms; never in gaming-houses, for which I still retained the holy horror of my early days. Without meaning it, I made some friends, either through quarrels or owing to the easy confidence established among those who are going to the bad together; nothing, possibly, makes us cling to one another so tightly as our evil propensities.

“I made several ventures in literature, which were flatteringly received. Great men who followed the profession of letters, having nothing to fear from me, belauded me, not so much on account of my merits as to cast a slur on those of their rivals.

“I became a ‘free-liver,’ to make use of the picturesque expression appropriated by the language of excess. I made it a point of honor not to be long about dying, and that my zeal and prowess should eclipse those displayed by all others in the jolliest company. I was always spruce and carefully dressed. I had some reputation for cleverness. There was no sign about me of the fearful way of living which makes a man into a mere disgusting apparatus, a funnel, a pampered beast.

“Very soon Debauch rose before me in all the majesty of its horror, and I grasped all that it meant. Those prudent, steady-going characters who are laying down wine in bottles for their heirs, can barely conceive, it is true, of so wide a theory of life, nor appreciate its normal condition; but when will you instill poetry into the provincial intellect? Opium and tea, with all their delights, are merely drugs to folk of that calibre.

“Is not the imperfect sybarite to be met with even in Paris itself, that intellectual metropolis? Unfit to endure the fatigues of pleasure, this sort of person, after a drinking bout, is very much like those worthy bourgeois who fall foul of music after hearing a new opera by Rossini. Does he not renounce these courses in the same frame of mind that leads an abstemious man to forswear Ruffec pates, because the first one, forsooth, gave him the indigestion?

“Debauch is as surely an art as poetry, and is not for craven spirits. To penetrate its mysteries and appreciate its charms, conscientious application is required; and as with every path of knowledge, the way is thorny and forbidding at the outset. The great pleasures of humanity are hedged about with formidable obstacles; not its single enjoyments, but enjoyment as a system, a system which establishes seldom experienced sensations and makes them habitual, which concentrates and multiplies them for us, creating a dramatic life within our life, and imperatively demanding a prompt and enormous expenditure of vitality. War, Power, Art, like Debauch, are all forms of demoralization, equally remote from the faculties of humanity, equally profound, and all are alike difficult of access. But when man has once stormed the heights of these grand mysteries, does he not walk in another world? Are not generals, ministers, and artists carried, more or less, towards destruction by the need of violent distractions in an existence so remote from ordinary life as theirs?

“War, after all, is the Excess of bloodshed, as the Excess of self-interest produces Politics. Excesses of every sort are brothers. These social enormities possess the attraction of the abyss; they draw towards themselves as St. Helena beckoned Napoleon; we are fascinated, our heads swim, we wish to sound their depths though we cannot account for the wish. Perhaps the thought of Infinity dwells in these precipices, perhaps they contain some colossal flattery for the soul of man; for is he not, then, wholly absorbed in himself?